How to Harvest & Store Sunflower Seeds

Sunflower seeds are easy to grow, and the time to harvest sunflower seeds is when they easily drop away from the plant. Discover how to dry sunflower seeds after they're harvested with help from a sustainable gardener in this free video on flower... View Video Transcript

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Yolanda Vanveen

Video Transcript

Hi, this is Yolanda Vanveen, and in this segment, I'm going to talk about, how to harvest and store sunflower seeds. Now, sunflower seeds are really easy to grow. They grow from sunflowers, so when you're starting your sunflowers, make sure and start them after the last frost, or early summer. Put them in the hottest, sunniest spot, you can find, and just give them lots of water, they'll grow, and make beautiful plants, and by the late summer, you'll find that you'll have big flower heads, with lots of seeds on them, and you know that they're ready to harvest, is if you take them, and you barely tap on the seeds, and they start pulling away from the plant. You don't want to actually pull them off, but if you barely tap them, and they start dropping, then you know your sunflowers are ready to harvest, and so you want to dry them too, so I found it's easy to just throw that whole pod, into a paper bag, and let it dry real well, and put it out in the sun, and just tap all the seeds off of it, and so once the seeds are dry, you can store them right in a paper bag, or you can put them in plastic. You just have to be careful, because if there's any moisture at all, they'll go moldy, but probably the best way to store them of all, is in glass, because if you think about it, whenever you buy sunflower seeds, a lot of times in the jars, that's when they're the freshest tasting, so the best way to store them, is to dry them really well, and put them in glass jars that are airtight, and then that way, you can enjoy them all winter long.